non-fiction-authors-from-australia

"... In 1961 she trained as a newspaper reporter and was sent to London to work for the Murdoch papers on . She filed reports from all over the world and interviewed such celebrities as the Dalai Lama, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and PG Wodehouse. The Duchess was despatched on several hazardous missions – notably to war-torn Vietnam and gave a graphic account of a strike mission she flew with the carrying . In 1963, she attended a dinner for in Miami four nights before he was assassinated in Dallas. Two years later, she returned to Vietnam, and was one of the first women to write about the effects of the bombing raids launched from Danang, the top secret centre where the US stockpiled its most deadly bombs."

"proposed as the chief gardener and William Brown as his assistant. Nelson had already 'sailed round the world in my service for the purpose of collecting plants and seeds and was eminently successful in the object of his mission,' wrote Banks."

"where George II died and where Queen Victoria was born is still used as apartments for the sovereign's relatives: Princess Margaret, the , and . The State Apartments and suite occupied by Princess Victoria are open."

"There is a that I will probably never send. I would not dare to. It is a cross of Jesus drawn in fresh blood from an animal sacrifice. Although slaughter for sacrifice contradicts a basic belief of Christianity, it is practiced by local Catholics, Greek Orthodox and other Christians at the in the village of , 20 miles from Jerusalem. "Around 70 to 80 lambs are sacrificed here each year," said the Roman Catholic priest, Father Raed. Similar sacrifices are also made in the towns of d, , and elsewhere in the Holy Land. Yet bloodless altars are a distinguishing feature of Christian churches. One of the tenets of the faith is that Jesus was the ultimate and final sacrifice. Christians atone for their sins without the shedding of blood. They look to Jesus as the who made the ancient belief in sacrifice obsolete. It is surely hypocritical of the churches to encourage millions of tourists and pilgrims to visit Jerusalem to see where Jesus Christ was crucified, but not halt this ritualised sacrifice."

"On 1 October 1918, when only sixteen, my father rode into Damascus with the , hours ahead of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and the colourful . Fighting in the sane campaign were another 100,000 soldiers including the , the only armed Jewish force fighting in Palestine for nearly 2,000 years. From their first steps on the moors of in 1917, these Jewish soldiers were trained to be part of the . After fighting alongside my father on the road to Damascus, some of these fighters went underground to eventually become founding members of Israel's biggest and most effective militia, the , which in 1948 would form the 's original army with a force in mid-May of 35,000 fighters."

"I’m standing outside Jane Edmanson’s home, drenched by the flash floods sweeping the city. A tour of her garden, I assume, is out of the question. “Nonsense!” she says, zipping up her coat. “There’s no such thing as ‘gardening weather’. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining, you just get out there and do what you can.” She strides through a muddy garden bed to get to her , then yanks off a sprig and crushes it. “Smell that,” she says, lifting it to my nose. “Isn’t it marvellous?” Her front yard is a jumble of flowers, s, trees and herbs. Some might consider it a smidge “overgrown”; she prefers the word “full”. She adores bushes that spill onto paths and sprouting in the cracks."

"“I’ve been doing it for 34 years,” says Jane Edmanson. “Can you imagine that?” Edmanson is speaking about her time on , where she has been a since the show began back in 1990. Outside of that role, the gardening expert has also published books on propagation and planting, and in 2004 received an medal for services to . She feels “very lucky” to have made a career out of her passion."

"Most of us enjoy or need a cup of tea or coffee at regular intervals, but with a within easy reach of the kitchen it is a very good reason to vary the flavours of the cuppa!"

"Australian didn't come of age until 's contribution. Her creative genius and her philosophy of integrating the house and garden into the landscape have had a huge influence on our garden history."

"s like , s and s will flower better if any dead spent flowers are snipped off."

"More and more people are becoming aware of herbs and appreciating the pleasure these plants give in the garden, kitchen and for cosmetics, medicines and s around the house. I couldn't live without my ."

"A glorious thing it is to live in a tent in the infinite—to waken in the grey of dawn, a good hour before the sun outlines the low ridges of the horizon, and to come out into the bright cool air, and scent the wind blowing across the mulga plains. My first thought would be to probe the ashes of my open fireplace, where hung my primitive cooking-vessels, in the hope that some embers had remained alight. Before I retired at night, I invariably made a good fire and covered the glowing coals with the soft ash of the jilyeli, having watched my compatriots so cover their turf fires in Ireland. I would next readjust the stones of the hob to leeward of the morning wind, and set the old Australian billy to boil, while I tidied my tent, and transformed it from bedroom to breakfast-room. As the sun came up, it changed that plain white room into the most exquisitely-frescoed pergola, with a patterning far surpassing the best of Grinling Gibbon’s handiwork. In a constant play of leafy light and shadow, I would eat my tea and toast in absolute content, while outside the blue smoke of the fire changed to grey in the bright sunlight. The mornings were spent in wandering from camp to camp, attending to the bodily needs of the scattered flock. I knew every bush, every pool, every granite boulder, by its age-old prehistoric name, with its legends and dream-time secrets, and its gradual inevitable change. There was no loneliness."

"There are a few fortunate races that have been endowed with cheerfulness as their main characteristic, the Australian Aborigine and the Irish being among these."

"Your true gentlewoman does not sit down and weep and say "I've never done such things"—she simply "does" and no more about it."

"Our road is the Road of Yesterday and the Road of Today, for Yesterday and Today are still the same."

"I invariably rose at sunrise, when the days are at their most glorious, and the whole world is full of beauty and music and dreaming, waking from its slumbers under the mists. I made my toilet to a chorus of impatient twittering. It was a fastidious toilet, for throughout my life I have adhered to the simple but exact dictates of fashion as I left it, when Victoria was queen—a neat white blouse, stiff collar and ribbon tie, a dark skirt and coat, stout and serviceable, trim shoes and neat black stockings, a sailor hat and a fly-veil, and, for my excursions to the camps, always a dust-coat and a sunshade. Not until I was in meticulous order would I emerge from my tent, dressed for the day. My first greeting was for the birds."

"By this time I was a confirmed wanderer, a nomad even as the aborigines. So close had I been in contact with them, that it was now impossible for me to relinquish the work. I realized that they were passing from us. I must make their passing easier. Moreover, all that I knew was little in comparison with all there was yet to learn. I made the decision to dedicate the rest of my life to this fascinating study."

"Every one of the natives whom I encountered on the east-west line had partaken of human meat, with the exception of Nyerdain, who told me it made him sick. They freely admitted their sharing of these repasts and enumerated those killed and eaten by naming the waters, and drawing a line with the big toe on the sand as they told over in gruesome memory the names they dared not mention. My first words to them were always “No more man-meat.” From the weekly supply train, I would procure part of a bullock or sheep and show them the game food areas, mallee-hen’s eggs, rabbits and so on, that must be their meats now, with as many dampers as I could provide, and a drink of sweetened tea. One morning very early, the news came that Nyan-ngauera had left the camp, taking a fire-stick and accompanied by her little girl. No one would follow her or help to track her. For twelve miles I followed the track unsuccessfully, but Nyan-ngauera doubled many times and gave birth to a child a mile west of my camp, where she killed and ate the baby, sharing the food with the little daughter. Later, with the help of her sons and grandsons, the spot was found, nothing to be seen there save the ashes of a fire. "The bones are under the fire", the boys told me, and digging with the digging-stick we came upon the broken skull, and one or two charred bones, which I later sent to the Adelaide Museum."

"No man or woman, who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way, is without enemies."

"Surely the world we live in is but the world that lives in us?"

"The Australian native can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation—but he cannot withstand civilization."

"Horny projections which look more like teeth are found in the beaks of a special group of ducks represented in Britain by and , sometimes known as "sawbills". In these birds the beak is narrow and the "teeth" are used for gripping fish."

"One of the areas whose birds have been given rather less attention than most is the arid western regions of South Africa. For various reasons it has been, and still is, an inhospitable country, in spite of the kindly disposition of its thinly scattered population. Its political history, at times somewhat turbulent; its desolate and fog-bound coastline, now made doubly inapproachable because of protective measures against illicit diamond prospecting; its vast hinterland of and ; and its own arid mountains and plains have discouraged travellers and ornithological pursuits. Although the birds of this region have been studied relatively infrequently most of the species represented have been known for a long time. The first ornithological survey of any importance took place as early as 1783-5 when the French naturalist, , made his second great journey ‘into the interior parts of Africa from the ’."

"If you are fortunate to have the chance to examine a recently dead bird, even one brought home from the poulterer with intact, spend a little time examining the s carefully and note down various points of interest."

"The may easily be mistaken for a male in flight. They are identical in size and are similarly barred below. The illusion is often fostered in late summer by young cuckoos being seen in flight with their foster-parents, much smaller birds ..."

"Macdonald selects twelve aspects of the life and behaviour of birds, illustrating them with Australian examples. Topics covered are Territorial Behaviour, , Population Problems, Post-Breeding Activities, , Distribution, Habitats and Adaptations, , Other Important Features, Various Systems, the Senses, and Variation and . The level of detail on each subject is well suited to the intended audience and avoids both superficiality and excessive detail. Indeed, beginners are far from the only birdwatchers who would profit from reading this book. The list of references, although short, is useful and reasonably comprehensive and would give the interested reader a useful introduction to the literature on a particular topic."

"When appointed to the in 1935 he was placed in the Bird Room, where he started as Assistant Keeper and retired in 1968 as Senior Scientific Officer in charge of the Bird Room and Deputy Keeper of the Zoology Department. Apart from war service with the , his entire career was dedicated to traditional museum ornithology. He ran collecting expeditions to South Sudan in 1938–1939 and South West Africa in 1950–1951, each substantially enhancing African collections in the Museum; that led to publication of a comprehensive report on the birds of the region. ... His professional career culminated in a sponsored mostly by Major Harold Hall, an Australian philanthropist. That was the last systematic collecting of Australian birds by an overseas institute, collecting in all parts of the continent and enriching the British Museum collection of Australian birds by some 6,500 specimens (skins, skeletons, and fluid). The leader of the first expedition in 1962–1963, Jim’s party discovered a new species of bird () in . In that expedition, his wife Betty accompanied him as doctor and caterer for the team."

"One of Australia's least savoury wildlife episodes was the long slaughter of s for their fur, which continued in some States to the end of the 1920's. In 1924 over 2 million koala pelts were exported, many under the pseudonym of to avoid the odium of publicity."

"The late , a Sydney printer and skilled and deservedly respected ornithologist, considered the to breed rarely in in his early days (born in 1904, he died in 1971). But in later years he recorded that some birds were always present and breeding. It seems likely that, in part at least, this change reflected the planting of flowering trees and shrubs in Sydney gardens."

"From time to time I get a query about an unusual waterhen people have seen. It's usually described as dark, with red legs — and a cocked tail that makes it look 'like a little '. Some say they have seen it far from water. Most agree that 'it runs like hell'. Over the years I've had more technical enquiries, but there's not the slightest doubt the bird in question in this case is that peculiarly Australian creation, the black-tailed native-hen ('), a species of small ."

"Watching bouncing, tinkling flocks of es feeding on thistles at once, the American ornithologist Dr guessed he had seen more goldfinches there than even in Europe."

"The lawyer-ornithologist tells of removing a 's nest from a 'well-formed hollow' in a in the outer suburbs of ... Two weeks later he cleared out a 's nest from the hollow. Three weeks later he flushed a from a clutch of three eggs in the same hollow. Clearly the starling is causing losses among native birds ..."

"An extraordinary diversity of , , bird and fauna had developed from n ancestors. Small, sharp-fanged marsupial 'lions'; cow-sized browsing s; giant kangaroos, even a kangaroo thought by its dentition to have been carnivorous; and huge, 3-metre flightless birds were all present."

"It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented."

"Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life — not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time."

"The happiness with which I am, inevitably, most concerned is my own, and next that of those who are in some way closely related to me. Indeed, for any reasonably benevolent person these cannot be separated: he will find much of his own happiness in the happiness of those for whom he cares, or in what he and they do together, where the enjoyment of each contributes so essentially to that of the other(s) that it will be more natural to say 'We had a good...' (whatever it was) than to speak of a mere sum of individual enjoyments."

"Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory."

"Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices."

"Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions, we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones."

"It is the main function of any economic system to produce cooperation that is quite independent of affection or goodwill, and it is one function of political organizations to maintain conditions in which this is possible. But if we accept the centrality of self-love and confined generosity, we must, as a corollary, accept competition and some degree of conflict between individuals and between groups."

"A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct — ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act. In this narrow sense, moral considerations would be considerations from some limited range, and would not necessarily include everything that a man allowed to determine what he did. In the second sense, someone could say quite deliberately, 'I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don't intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.'"

"Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take."

"Men...are almost always concerned more with their selfish ends than with helping one another. The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men's sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done."

"No doubt one can stretch the notion of egocentric commendation...by saying that appropriate conditional, perhaps counterfactually conditional, clauses are to be assumed. The carving knife is one such as I would favour if I wanted to slice meat; the sunset is one such as I would favour if I were one for the beauties of nature; the weather is such as I would favour if I were a potato-grower — or, more dubiously, if I were a potato. But this is stretching the account, and it is gratuitous. What is common to all these cases is that in each there is, somewhere in the picture, some set of requirements or wants or interests, and the thing that is called good is being said to be such as to satisfy those requirements or wants or interests."

"The abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause...a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that...people...have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well."

"In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so."

"Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connections seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy."

"'Our sense of justice,' whether it is just yours and mine, or that of some much larger group, has no authority over those who dissent from its recommendations or even over us if we are inclined to change our minds."

"If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe."

"If men had been overwhelmingly benevolent, if each had aimed only at the happiness of all, if everyone had loved his neighbour as himself, there would. have been no need for the rules that constitute justice. Nor would there have been any need for them if nature had supplied abundantly, and without any effort on our part, all that we could want, if food and warmth had been as inexhaustibly available as, until recently, air and water seemed to be."